As our president’s heart continues to fail and his brain continues to demonstrably deteriorate, as he continues to dig himself deeper into a hole as it becomes more apparent every day that he is heavily implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein files, he has taken another wild stab at an authoritarian power grab. Not satisfied with his lackluster (but still terrifying) attempts to occupy Los Angeles, he is now turning his fascist rage on the people of Washington DC.
His justification for taking over DC’s police and flooding the streets with armed federal agents is that the city is supposedly overrun with crime and homelessness. He stated on Truth Social that: “The homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY. We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital.”
This justification of excessive use of police force to target unhoused people should sound very familiar to residents of the Westside. For years, Traci Park has used eerily similar rhetoric when discussing homelessness. She has framed people sleeping in tents and vehicles as a scourge to quality of life for “real” residents of our district, and she has pushed policing and criminalization as the only legitimate tools for addressing the crisis. She has lied repeatedly and claimed that people are being offered housing and refusing it, when in reality she has blocked any form of homeless housing from being built in the district.
Trump is justifying his takeover of DC due to supposed out-of-control crime, but in reality crime is down 35% in DC compared to last year. Similarly, Traci constantly fearmongers about crime, despite the city potentially seeing its lowest homicide rate in 60 years. This should come as no surprise to anyone who understands her extensive ties to the same right-wing forces that back Trump.
Park has aggressively championed the abhorrent Grants Pass ruling from our far-right, billionaire-controlled, Supreme Court. The ruling allows cities to more aggressively criminalize homelessness, even when there is no shelter available to them, functionally stripping unhoused people of their Eighth Amendment rights entirely. The instant the ruling came down, Park seized on the opportunity with a motion to update city laws to criminalize anyone living outside. She wanted to use the exact same legal authority that Trump is now using to occupy our nation’s capital.
Traci will often claim that unhoused people in her district are refusing housing and treatment when offered, but this is a plain-faced lie. You can see in the map above that Council District 11 only has a handful of shelter beds available, and these are not permanent housing units. A recent survey of 99 vehicle dwellers in West LA by the UCLA Luskin School found that only a fraction of vehicle dwellers had ever been offered housing, and most of those offers were vague and non-specific.
A recent related RAND study concluded that the supposed “decline” in homelessness in Venice is due to displacement and criminalization rather than housing. The percentage of people sleeping in West LA without tents or vehicles has increased, which is the direct result of Park’s aggressive destruction of vehicle dwellings and relentless use of encampment sweeps. These sweeps, in which LA Sanitation destroys people’s tents and belongings under the threat of arrest or a bullet from LAPD, are entirely ineffective at getting people off the streets but extremely effective at letting LAPD collect big overtime checks. (The police union is one of Park’s biggest donors and most aggressive backers.)
Furthermore, Park has used all of her political capital ruthlessly trying to stop the Venice Dell project from being built, a project that would create hundreds of units of housing for unhoused people. She is not remotely interested in actually solving the housing crisis, she is solely focused on the cruel theater of cleansing the streets of the unhoused, just like Donald Trump.
During her 2022 city council campaign, Traci Park worked closely with a tight-knit coterie of far-right extremists. Her campaign advisor was Bill Simon, a trustee of the Heritage Foundation; yes, the Project 2025 Heritage Foundation. Her campaign paid $5,000 to Heidi Sigmund Cuda, a former Breitbart contributor. Deepening her ties to Breitbart, she’s extremely chummy with Breitbart editor Joel Pollak, appearing on his podcast twice. She may be officially registered as a Democrat, but it is clear through her closest associations that she is directly aligned with Trump supporters.
Let’s consider how deeply the Right has been laying the groundwork for their fascist campaign against the unhoused for years.
A recent article from In These Times by Rebcca Burns gives useful context to how extensively MAGA billionaires are invested in the social cleansing of unhoused people across the country. Far-right Palantir alum and Trump super PAC leader Joe Lonsdale founded the Cicero Institute, a think tank devoted to crafting extreme anti-unhoused policies and advocating for more private prisons to be built to warehouse the unhoused. They have pushed for state laws that have passed in Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida. Similarly to Traci Park’s insistence that the cause of homelessness is addiction and mental illness, rather than the extreme unaffordability of housing, the Cicero Institute advocates for forced treatment, even though extensive research shows this is ineffective when not paired with stable housing.
There has been a coordinated nationwide push by MAGA to criminalize homelessness, and it is plainly apparent that Traci Park is in lock-step with that movement. In a recent newsletter Traci wrote the following: “Despite clear legal pathways, the City refuses to change policies that allow people to remain on the streets even when there’s an alternative available, and the County refuses to mandate treatment for those suffering from serious addiction and mental health problems.” This framing is taken directly from the Cicero Institute, and the “legal pathway” she’s referring to is the Grants Pass decision.
Fascism begins with targeting people at the margins. Trump spent all of last year whipping his base into a white supremacist frenzy about immigrants so that they would gleefully take pictures outside of his Everglades concentration camp. He is now turning his fascist fury on the poorest people in our society, people unable to afford shelter.
Make no mistake, as he uses the full might of the militarized law enforcement under his command, unhoused people in DC will be facing the exact same terror campaign that he’s unleashed on our immigrant neighbors in LA. We cannot allow ourselves to succumb to this fascist dehumanization of other people; we cannot allow our unhoused neighbors to be shoved into Trump’s authoritarian carceral machine. Elected officials like Traci Park can claim they’re just trying to get tough on real solutions, but it should be clear by now that her policies are part and parcel of the MAGA agenda.
All people of conscience in Council District 11, all people who reject Trump and everything he stands for, need to recognize the fascism taking shape in our own backyard. Traci Park puts a polite face on what is actually a deeply evil and dehumanizing policy of violation of people’s human rights. Six people a day die unsheltered on the streets of Los Angeles; Traci’s policies directly contribute to those deaths. When tent encampments are violently swept by elected officials like Traci, people lose access to life-saving medications like NARCAN and die.
What Traci Park has been engaged in during her entire time in office is a social cleansing campaign, a policy of violent expulsion of a social and public health problem into other parts of the city and into our deadly jails. If we reject MAGA nationally, we need to drive out its pernicious roots locally. We have a duty to each other, to our most vulnerable neighbors, to create a country that rejects fascism entirely.
Carter Moon is a community organizer and entertainment industry worker based in West Los Angeles. This article was originally published on Carter by Carter
